Rise Onlinehttps://riseonline.co.uk
Birmingham SEO Company
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3232139974234Why Authority and Expertise Matterhttps://riseonline.co.uk/why-authority-and-expertise-matter/
Thu, 25 Oct 2018 14:45:26 +0000https://riseonline.co.uk/?p=5238As search marketers we are always at the mercy of the most commonly used search engines. For some time now, Google has been the go to search engine for the majority of internet users and so when Google makes a change to the way it displays search results, everyone tends to sit up and take notice.

It isn’t just search marketers who are at the mercy of search engines though – of course, searchers are also at the mercy of the likes of Google.

Google has always had one key objective, and that is to provide their users with the best possible information relevant to their intended search term. Google periodically rolls out what are known as core algorithmic updates to improve the results it shows its users – these are in addition to minor daily changes that are made to the algorithm. One of the most recent core updates took place in early August and was rolled out over several days.

The result? Well that depends.

In SEO circles, the update was mainly targeted at YMYL website (your money or your life) which in layman’s terms means any websites that are related to money or health. The update put a huge emphasis on expertise, authority and trustworthiness – of course, there is an acronym for that – E-A-T.

Essentially, Google started to reward websites that were clearly showing expertise, authority and trustworthiness and massively down-ranked websites that did not have what they deemed to be the necessary credentials. From an historic SEO perspective, these sites may have had everything in place to rank but the new update meant they shifted from page one to obscurity.

If you have a website that is either in the financial niche or the health/medical niche then the chances are you will already know about this update, but if you are not in these industries should you care about it and if you are in those industries, how can you improve your E-A-T rating and is it even possible?

Why Authority and Expertise Matter for your Website

If your website doesn’t fall under the YMYL category then you might be thinking that E-A-T is not important to you. This is rarely the case in search marketing and if Google starts something small and finds it works, then they often roll it out on a bigger scale. The point of this update was to ensure that searchers were getting quality information for potentially life changing or life threatening search terms. While it may seem obvious that Google would want this for financial and health related searches we already know that Google essentially wants this for all searches – therefore, it is fair to assume that the Big G is highly likely to roll this sort of update out across a number of other websites as the impact fits their core aims so well.

So it makes sense to want to show expertise, authority and trustworthiness to protect ourselves from possible future updates.

In addition to this, from a personal point of view, surely we should want to be placing ourselves and our business as an authority, having expertise and being trustworthy anyway. Aren’t these three attributes going to set us apart from the competition and increase our conversions from website visitors to customers?

Whether you are a local service provider, online retailer, national or international company – surely it serves you to position yourself as an expert with authority and as a company the customer can trust.

How To Demonstrate Authority, Expertise and Trustworthiness

There is a distinction to make here between how you show your E-A-T-ability for search engines and how you demonstrate it to your customers. For most businesses, our advice is usually to go with what feels natural for your customers and put them first rather than a search engine. There are a few pointers you can follow though to make your expertise, authority and trustworthiness shine for search engines too.

To show authority and expertise it will largely come down to your reputation. For the medical and financial industries this meant that pages that had been clearly written by authors or bloggers with a strong reputation or were well know as experts were rewarded in the search results. Google wants to know that the author of the content has expertise in that particular field. This means that including author information is important and that the biography of that author is relevant to the topic.

To take it one step further, other online profiles for that author should indicated expertise or knowledge of the field. Investing some time in personal branding for the author – perhaps their own website, updating their LinkedIn page etc. would be a worthwhile task. You could also use structured data markup to indicate the author or business owner’s personal brand pages such as social profiles.

To establish a website as an authority we always suggest content creation as a critical process. Most businesses find it difficult to keep on top of this but it can make such a difference to the website visitors and we already understand the importance of fresh content on a website from Google’s freshness index. Regularly adding high quality content that positions the company as an expert can certainly help display expertise to your customers and hopefully to search engines too.

Trustworthiness is a difficult one to put your finger on and perhaps lends itself more to the technical elements of a website than the actual content itself. Ensuring the users data is secure by running fully functioning SSL certificates over HTTPS is a good starting point – there are still so many websites that haven’t ensured they are compliant with this. Consider also where your outbound links are going. If you have an affiliate website that links out to websites with unscrupulous offers then the chances are you are not going to be deemed as trustworthy. Likewise, if you are constantly citing information from Wikipedia for stats and information in your articles then you are probably not going to be a shining beacon of trustworthiness.

Final Thought: As always, put yourself in the position of your website users. What would you want to see? What would you want to know? Don’t create content for the sake of it but try and provide value to real problems that real people might have.

]]>5238Is SEO a good fit for your business?https://riseonline.co.uk/is-seo-a-good-fit-for-your-business/
Wed, 20 Dec 2017 10:12:31 +0000https://riseonline.co.uk/?p=4549One of the least common questions potential new customers of ours ask is whether search engine optimisation is a good fit for their business.

Often, they may have been sold an SEO service in the past that has not lived up to expectation or they may have heard of huge success stories as a result of using SEO from their acquaintances.

Just because one business has seen massive success from using search marketing does not mean that it is suitable for every business and that’s one of the reasons we are so strict about our clients completing our discovery form. It allows us to assess the suitability of an SEO campaign for their business and make estimations as to the expected return on investment.

How Do I know If SEO Is A Good Fit For My Business?

Like any form of marketing there are costs associated with search marketing – and like any form of marketing, you will usually be looking for that marketing to provide a return on the initial investment.

There are three key factors we use to determine the suitability of a business for SEO – and whilst we do consider other aspects, these are the ones that are usually the deal makers or the deal breakers:

The number of searches per month and potential for new customers through organic search

Lifetime value of each new customer acquired

The potential cost and timescale of the campaign

Search Volume

Sometimes our clients will have an idea of what ranking in position one might mean for their business. If it is a local company, they might have an idea of how well a competitor is doing from ranking position one. But we like to back this up with facts and statistics.

We usually operate on a conversion rate of around 0.5% – 1% and although conversion rates can differ hugely from industry to industry and website to website – we use this as a starting point.

So if a search term has 1000 searches per month, position 1 should attract around 40% of that traffic (statistically speaking) which would be 400 hits per month on site. This would equate to between 2 and 4 new customers per month based on the conversion rate mentioned.

We do also have to take in to account search intent and any data the client already has around conversion. If they tell us their site converts cold traffic at 5% then of course the forecast for increased revenue is wildly different. We also know that searches with more buyer intent behind them will convert better.

For example – someone searching for ‘best electrician in Birmingham’ is more likely to convert to a customer than someone searching for the term ‘electrician’. Just the word ‘best’ gives you an idea that they are indeed looking for the best person for the job – right now. The keyword ’emergency electrician in Birmingham’ is also going to have a very high buyer intent behind it and a higher conversion rate.

Value

The lifetime value of each customer is key to making a judgement on whether SEO will work for a business. If each new client is worth £5,000 over their customer lifecycle then acquiring 2-4 new customers per month would be worth £10,000 – £20,000 newly acquired business coming in per month. However, if each new customer was worth £500 lifetime value then the business is going to need 10 times more traffic to generate the same level of return from SEO. How long that lifecycle lasts is another thing to consider as this will impact on how quickly the investment can be recouped.

Essentially, SEO is a long term investment but that doesn’t mean a client should wait 12 months before they see a return. At Rise Online, we attack long tail keywords (or the low hanging fruit as we like to call it) first to allow quicker gains, whilst going after the trophy keywords in the longer term.

Despite this, anyone new to SEO should be preparing for a few months of no to little return on investment. We explain to clients that they should expect to see returns after a set timeframe (although it is often sooner) so they can budget accordingly.

If there is simply not enough search volume to warrant an SEO campaign then we will explain this from the outset.

Cost and Time

The final key factor when assessing suitability for search engine optimisation is how much a campaign will cost and how long it should be expected to run for.

We have clients that range from £250 per month and clients that pay us in excess of £1500 per month. That is a significant investment for any business and it doesn’t suit all business models. If you are an e-commerce store selling penny sweets and very few people are searching for your product then it is not feasible to invest even £250 per month. Although that is an extreme example it illustrates the point well. On the other hand, if you are selling gold bars at £10,000 each and you make a profit of £5,000 on each – then you only need a small number of sales to make it worth investing in excess of £1,500 per month.

Essentially, the cost and time of a project come down to the websites of the competition and the authority your own website already has in relation to the industry.

We always estimate timeframes and give costings from the outset.

Again, the business will need to budget accordingly as it is often 6-9 months before an SEO project will break even – although this is very much dependent on the individual company.

Hopefully that will give you an idea of how we assess suitability for a company to engage in a fully managed SEO service. If you have further questions then please do not hesitate to pick up the phone and give us a call, or fill out our discovery form to find out if your business is suited to SEO – the link is in the menu.

]]>4549Why You Should Check Your Rankings And Howhttps://riseonline.co.uk/seo-rank-checking/
Tue, 19 Dec 2017 16:51:30 +0000https://riseonline.co.uk/?p=4525Whether you have a business website, a blog, an e-commerce site or another type of site – once you start focusing on improving your website rankings for certain keyword search phrases you will want to keep abreast of progress. But be warned, there are good ways to do this and ways that will actually harm your SEO efforts.

It is also worth noting that search engine optimisation is not the quickest of processes and it can sap your time – so manually checking your rankings is hardly going to make you more efficient.

In this article we will look at the optimum methods for checking your rankings on a variety of budgets that will provide accurate results using the most time effective solutions.

Should I Check My Rankings?

Of course, once you start treading the path of SEO you will want to see the results, so it is only natural to want to turn to Google every day or so and see where you are ranking.

The problem with this is two fold:

It is not a good use of your time and if you are doing this more than once a day (maybe even once per week) then it is not an effective use of your time

You can actually harm your results by continually searching for the keyword phrase

Why Can Searching My Keywords Negatively Impact On My Results?

Google works in real time more than ever these days and part of the algorithm focuses on user engagement. If you are targeting a keyword that has a search volume per month of 2000+ searches you are probably not going to impact the results with a small amount of searching,..

BUT…

If you are targeting keywords that have search volumes of 200 or less then your once per day search could account for more than 10% of that traffic. Click through rate (CTR) and then user engagement metrics on site (such as bounce rate, session length etc.) are all methods of Google measuring how relevant your website is to the search query. If you are searching for your keyword 2 or 3 times per day then suddenly your search equates to 30-40% of the searches per month and your site receives no clicks – this is not going to help you.

If you are thinking, okay then… I’ll just search and click on my site and spend some time there every day – again this is not going to work as your IP address is logged and it will look suspicious to Google. It is also an absolutely ridiculous use of your time!

How Do I Check My Rankings?

The easiest way to overcome the problem of heading to Google and searching away is to use a rank tracking program. There are free tools out there but as with most things you do get what you pay for. We have tested numerous tools for tracking rankings but the two that we now recommend are Pro Rank Tracker (the tool that we use for our own sites and clients sites) and Microsite Masters. Pro Rank Tracker is cheaper (packages starting from just $19 per month) but both are very good tools.

Above is an example of how you can filter your rankings by position or by keyword volume. What we like about this is that the search volumes seem pretty accurate and it breaks down global vs. local (local being the city or country). The example you see is for one of our own sites that has just hit position 1 for a number of high volume search terms.

Is There A Free Way To Check?

There is another way to check rankings but it is a little more laborious and not quite as accurate – which is crazy as it actually uses the Google Search Console.

Log in to Google Search Console (also known as Webmaster Tools) and click on search traffic on the left hand menu, followed by search analytics. Make sure you tick the ‘position’ check box (as pictured below) and you might also want to check the impressions and CTR.

Once you have done this you will be able to filter through the results. The advantage of this tool is that you can see the exact number of clicks, impressions and CTR for your search terms. You may also discover terms you didn’t realise you were ranking for which is always a bonus (Pro Rank Tracker does this for you too).

The only negative of this process is that it is a little more time consuming to use this method and it also throws in some strange anomalies so you will sometimes find yourself using Google to check the results which ends up being counter intuitive.

In Summary

If you are doing your own SEO then tracking your progress is key. Hopefully this article has provided you with some handy resources to do this in the most effective and accurate way that suits your budget.

If you would like to find out more about how riseonline.co.uk can assist with your SEO then simply hit the discover button in the menu. You can find out more about Search Optimisation here.

]]>4525Simple Tips For Local SEOhttps://riseonline.co.uk/tips-for-local-seo/
Mon, 18 Dec 2017 13:53:07 +0000https://riseonline.co.uk/?p=4514When it comes to SEO there are some things that work across the board (no matter what sort of website it is) and there are others that are specifically relevant to local SEO. This article will mix a little bit of both but will be particularly useful if you own a local business – in other words a business that targets a specific geo-location.

What is local SEO?

Local SEO is simply the art of search engine optimisation for a business that operates in a particular area. For example – if an electrician from Birmingham was looking to rank their website for the keyword ‘electrician’ from searches that originate in the Birmingham area then they would be looking to perform some local SEO on their website.

It also applies to search phrases that include the location keyword in the query – for example ‘electricians in Birmingham’ or ‘Birmingham electricians’ – see below for an example of how they are displayed:

Why is local SEO important?

Local SEO is important for two main reasons. One is that mobile and desktop searches that can be influenced by location (typically service related searches which are highly applicable to local businesses) will have the map pack (typically showing three Google maps results) displayed at the top of page one. It is not always at the top but for localised search it usually is.

The second reason is that Google is now applying localised results in the standard SERPs – in other words the normal Google listings.

Tips to improve your local SEO

As previously stated, some of these tips are relevant to all types of search engine optimisation and some are specific to just local SEO – however, you will need to implement all of these to enjoy ranking benefits and it is good practice to apply these methods anyway. These should provide you with some quick wins for your local business website.

Method 1: Keyword Research

Any SEO project should start with some form of keyword research. This usually starts with thinking like the potential customer and using a variety of tools to extract search volumes and semantic keywords to build a larger list of potential target keywords.

We use tools such as Ahrefs, SemRush, Google Keyword Planner (AdWords) and SERPED to find keyword volumes and conduct deeper keyword research. If you are looking for ways to discover more keywords you can start with a seed keyword and then use Google Keyword Planner to give you further suggestions or use a tool such as UberSuggest.

Even simply using Google will provide you with plenty of alternatives as it will give you the popular search phrases at the bottom of the page. Look at these suggestions for the keyword ‘SEO expert Birmingham‘.

Again, this is easier said than done as it takes experience and knowhow to understand exactly how to do this effectively, and what works today might not work tomorrow. However, our advice would be to go for a natural approach to content, URL structure, image optimisation and your meta titles and descriptions – but with a clear focus and intent to include some keywords and keyword variations from your research.

You do not want to over-optimise your content and incur a penalty as a result so always go for an approach that is natural.

If your website was a branded domain – e.g. www.kellybrothers.com then you might want to create a page called www.kellybrothers.com/birmingham-electrician as the main page to rank for the Birmingham related keywords.

However, if your website was www.kellyelectriciansbirmingham.com then a page such as www.kellyelectriciansbirmingham.com/birmingham-electricians is going to be edging towards over-optimisation before you even add any content, images or meta data – so you should avoid creating pages such as these.

You will have to use your judgement here, but as a rule, whichever approach you take you will want to have at least 500 words of original, well written and relevant content on the page.

Once you have your content in place on the page that is relevant then you will want to add some images. Again, feel free to use some keyword variations for the image title and alt tags but don’t be too repetitive. Alt tags should be handled with care and certainly not used to stuff keywords in to.

Your meta data is going to come from your title tag and meta description. This can be easily managed with a plugin (if using WordPress) such as Yoast or All In One SEO. Again, you want this to read naturally, not have duplicated keywords and it should be written to convert on the search engine results pages.

This is our meta title and description for the Rise Online homepage

As you can see from the image, there are no duplicate keywords, we have the brand in the title and description so we are also optimising for our brand name searches and we have variations of our main keyword.

Method 3: Claim And Optimise Your Google My Business Page

The first thing you want to do is to check whether you already have a Google My Business listing as you don’t want a duplicate listing. Simply search your company name followed by the city or just search for the business address in Google. If nothing comes back from this then you don’t have a listing.

If you do have a listing then you will see the listing on the right hand side of Google on desktop or at the top of the mobile SERPS.

If it is your business you can simply hit claim and follow the instructions. One thing to note is that Google will usually require a postcard to be sent to the business address so no cheating here.

Ensure the name of the business, address and phone number is identical to what is on your website and make a note of the exact way this is displayed. We will refer to this name, address and phone number as your NAP from now on.

You will also want to add as much detail to your GMB page as possible, including opening hours and your website link. Ensure you verify your listing as soon as you receive your Google postcard.

Method 4: Create Relevant Links and Citations

This part is dependent on your Google My Business page being set up correctly with the NAP that you are going to use for what we call citations. Essentially a citation is a business listing on a website that will include your business NAP.

You want to aim to get high authority citations from reputable directories – and preferably ones that are niche/industry relevant.

For example, a photographer should aim for photography based listings whereas our electrician should aim for listings from electrician based sites.

You will also need to supplement this with more general business listings but you want to go for ones with power and authority. The easy way to leverage what your competition is already doing is to use a tool such as Moz Local, Bright Local or Whitespark.ca to identify what citations your top competitors have. All of these sites offer you a full service to create and manage these for you but we recommend doing them yourself – especially if you want to learn. It will also give you full control later if you need to change anything. It is well worth having a domain email address for this e.g. jason@kellybrothers.com.

Anything that your top 3-5 competitors have you should look to replicate.

Tip: Remember to keep your NAP consistent across all citations

Method 5: Build Supporting Content

Something that is often overlooked is the content on your site and using it to add relevance to what you do. Our Birmingham based electrician is focusing on the wider Birmingham area. Now, whilst they might not be able to hit the map pack for searches that originate in every part of the city, they might be able to grab rankings in the standard SERPS. This is far more likely if you have content that is linking to your geo-page that adds location relevance.

For example, you might create pages for different suburbs in the city such as:

www.kellybrothers.com/sutton-coldfield

www.kellybrothers.com/edgbaston

www.kellybrothers.com/small-heath

Having all of these pages linking back to the www.kellybrothers.com/birmingham-electrician page could add geographical relevance. Just remember that the content on these pages needs to be original and follow the guidelines we set out in method 2.

The added bonus of these is that they might start to rank themselves and bring in extra traffic to your site. We recently added a geo page for Sutton Coldfield – it has very little to do with SEO but almost instantly ranked position 2 for the term ‘Sutton Coldfield SEO’ which has around 30 searches per month – better than nothing!

Hopefully that gives you some actionable tips to take away and implement with your local SEO campaign. If you need further support or are looking for someone to managed your SEO campaign then get in touch today or start at https://riseonline.co.uk

]]>4514Which Online Reviews Matter For SEO?https://riseonline.co.uk/which-online-reviews-matter-for-seo/
Fri, 15 Dec 2017 10:11:10 +0000https://riseonline.co.uk/?p=4506Whether you operate a small local business, a national e-commerce website or a global operation – you all have one thing in common…

It is that your reputation matters and it is there for all to see at the click of a button.

Online reviews are big business because people are happy to put their faith in a company based on the opinions of others. In digital marketing, if a review comes from social media then this is often referred to as social proof – but with so many review websites out there it can be a minefield knowing which ones to focus on and which ones will actually make a difference to your business.

Which Reviews Matter To My Business?

The simple answer and the truthful answer is that all reviews matter to your business to some extent and they can even be helpful in terms of search marketing.

The higher the cost of your product or service the more important a review becomes to your company.

Say for example I am looking to buy a Thundercats mug and I end up on Amazon – I already trust the e-commerce site so I just want to check the quality of the product – so I am just going to read the reviews on the page or maybe even just look at the overall star rating. If I am buying from an independent site that I don’t know then I might look around for trust icons or reviews/testimonials on their site – but the chances are with the product costing £5-£10 I am going to be willing to take a risk.

On the other hand, if you are a builder providing loft conversions at a cost of around £20,000 I am going to want to check a much higher number of reviews and from a number of sources – however my starting point for this will probably be the company website and then Google.

So essentially, the reviews that matter will depend on how much trust someone has to put in your business in order to become your customer. For a builder or high ticket price company I would suggest to Google your ‘company name + review’ and go at least 3 pages deep. For companies who need less trust then covering page one is probably sufficient – as well as any industry standard websites.

For all businesses you will want to have an active and fully optimised Google My Business account and be collecting reviews there.

And of course, good old Facebook is also great for that social proof.

How To Get The Most From Google Reviews?

Google is pretty much the go to place for most people searching for a service or product. The great thing about Google is that you will show up for your brand name, so if someone is searching for your business they will be greeted by your full business details and your reviews and star rating (out of 5).

It will also display this in the local search results in the map pack. Guess who is going to get the most calls from this local search for ‘roofers in Wolverhampton’!

It is also interesting to note in this example that Check A Trade and Yell.com are the first two organic results so Best Roofing Services (which has 37 5 star reviews) might want to focus on getting reviews there.

From there, a potential customer might type the brand name in to Google. For this particular brand you are greeted by their own website in first place, followed by an award from ‘Best Rated’ – even more social proof. Those Google reviews are also displayed prominently on the page and so everything ties together.

To get the most from your Google reviews you need to work at it. We recently (April 2017) rebranded from Brum Design SEO to Rise Online and of course none of our 5 star reviews from the old brand were transferred to the new – as we wanted to run the two companies at the same time for about 12 months.

This is how our reviews look now.

So we have recently had a push on gathering reviews from the new clients we have worked with this year. Now, like most people, our clients are extremely busy and we need to make it as easy as possible for them to leave the review. Unfortunately, Google My Business does not make it easy to create a link to your GMB review page.

But there is a work around…

How To Create A Link For A Google My Business Review

Whitespark.ca is a tool that we use quite extensively when working with local businesses to identify citations. But they also have an excellent free tool that is super quick and easy to help you generate a link to your Google My Business review page.

Interaction Matters

Finally, to get the most from your Google reviews (and any others that allow this) you should respond to them. Not only does it make the customer feel like you have acknowledged their effort of leaving a review (and hopefully encourage them to leave one somewhere else) but it also shows potential new customers that are reading your reviews that customer service matters to you. Not to mention that Google loves people interacting with it’s GMB pages so it is fair to assume that you would gain a small map pack ranking boost from this.

If you are struggling with building your local reviews and would like some help to find ways to better encourage your customers to leave reviews for your site or perhaps you need help setting up your Google My Business profile head to https://riseonline.co.uk and get in touch today. For more posts about SEO you can head to our Rise Online Google Plus.

If you have ever had a quote for search engine optimisation then you might already have an opinion as to where this article is leading. If you have had several quotes for SEO then you might be in a state of shock, confusion or both and be seeking some clarity in a matter that is rarely clear among the professionals, let alone clients.

In this article, we will look to address some of the issues around SEO pricing and look to debunk a few myths as well as provide some clarity on how we price projects here at Rise Online.

The first thing to point out is that search engine optimisation is essentially marketing for your business. It is a very unique form of marketing and as such it has some clear benefits but also some drawbacks too. When deciding on how best to spend your marketing budget it always pays to have as much understanding as possible, so do your research, crunch the numbers and hope for the best – at least that’s they way some companies explain it – but it shouldn’t be that hard surely?

What Are The Costs Associated With SEO?

Depending on the approach you take the cost of SEO will vary. There are a number of factors that come in to play including:

Current state of your website (by state we mean position in SERPS, current on-page SEO, authority, usability etc)

How competitive the niche you are targeting is

Are you looking for local, national or global reach?

The timeframe you wish to work to (6 months, 12 months, 5 years etc.)

Your current reputation and traffic (Google/social reviews, how much traffic does the site already generate)

There can be many more sub-factors to consider such as the backlink profile of the site – do these links need to disavowed etc but we have tried to cover these with blanket terms above for the sake of not forcing you to read a novel rather than a blog post.

The answer to the question that this article poses essentially will depend on who you ask. To a certain extent it will also depend on the answer you are willing to accept. We all know of the emails we are sent offering SEO services for £99 per month. Now in some (very rare) cases this may be perfectly feasible and perhaps if you were running a project over a 5-10 year period this could be the case, but it wouldn’t be a sensible approach in the majority of cases.

Other companies will charge in excess of £5,000 per month. Again, this may make perfect sense for a large corporation but there are few instances where a small to medium sized firm would be able to budget for this.

So how on earth do you budget or know what to budget for an SEO campaign – and crucially, get a return on your investment.

The Advantage of SEO

That brings us nicely on to one significant advantage of search engine optimisation – and that is that you can in most cases measure the impact pretty well. This is particularly easy with new businesses or company websites that previously had little to no traffic – but even with more established business websites it should be pretty easy for an SEO company to track the impact of the ranking jumps on against traffic.

Using conversion tags in Google Analytics allows you to track the results of the organic traffic in terms of purchases, communications, email opt-ins etc.

You should also expect to be able to track ranking increases on a weekly or monthly timescale so you can see that the campaign is heading in the right direction.

The Downside

The downside of SEO is that there is often no guarantee from a client’s perspective. It is difficult to hand over vast sums of money each and every month without seeing a return for perhaps the first 4-6 months. At Rise Online we have a way around this, so give Jason a call on 0121 240 3837 if you want to discuss how we remedy this issue.

The truth is that other forms of marketing suffer the same fate. Print marketing is the number one area that our clients tell us have little to no impact on them acquiring new customers. It is costly and our clients tell us it doesn’t work for them – for every 1 that says it is effective there are 25 that say it isn’t. But then some would tell you the same about SEO – ask our clients though and that ratio is reversed.

So How Much Does Should It Cost?

As much as possible, we like to keep our prices in line with our client’s expectations of the project and their budget. In other words, the results they expect and the budget they can afford.

We have to find a way for those expectations and the budget to meet.

No sometimes, this is just not possible. For example, recently an e-commerce company contacted us and asked us to generate over 100 position one rankings for various products. There was good search volume but it was a fiercely competitive space. If these rankings were achieved it was likely that the company would have increased it’s yearly revenue by £100,000+ per year but they could not budge from a budget of £250 per month. There is no form of marketing that will generate that level of return on investment.

However, with that being said, it is possible to be flexible and work to a customer’s budget.

For most projects we will set an expected project length of anything between 6 to 18 months. This is how long we expect it to take to rank the target keywords. The factors listed above come in to play on that and of course this timescale adds to the overall cost.

However, if it helps a client to spread the cost over a 24 month period instead of a 12 month period then it could take a £750 per month project down to a £375 per month project. So you can see there is a degree of flexibility.

What I urge anyone to avoid is a company that just provides a flat fee of say £100 per month or £250 per month regardless of your website, competition and keywords. There is no way they can know how to cost the campaign or for how long and we have clients who have been with these companies in the past for several years with zero results – but over that time they have paid out perhaps 6 years of £100 per month!

So Where Does Your Budget Go With Rise Online?

We obviously wont’t break down where every penny goes in this article, but essentially your budget is spent on hard costs to us and then our time. The first month of any campaign is always very time intensive as this is when we spend the most time on your site, making on page changes, tweaking/creating new content, optimising images etc.

Following on from month one, much of the costs are associated with outreach, content and link building. That sounds simple but requires time and a decent amount of the budget is spent on link building – for which we use a number of white hat methods.

The Conclusion

The answer to the question is a unique one. It is unique to your business, your budget, your aims and who quickly you want to achieve them. At Rise Online we do not work with all businesses that come to us for help. It is quite true that SEO is not a good fit for all businesses, but if it is, we explain very clearly the obstacles in our way and how we can overcome them – and crucially how long this will take and what it will cost you.

If you would like to find out more about the way we work head to https://riseonline.co.uk and check out the video. If you are ready to work with us then hit the discover button in the menu and fill out the form. You can read more from our SEO Birmingham based blog on our Google Plus Page.

]]>4499HTTPS or HTTP? There Is Now Only One Answer!https://riseonline.co.uk/google-chrome-version-62-update-october-2017/
Fri, 22 Sep 2017 13:39:37 +0000https://riseonline.co.uk/?p=4069Google have been in the headlines again recently for manipulating search results in favour of their own shopping services, they have been heavily fined and warned that they must change the way they display these results. So the fact that Google talk about trust at all is quite ironic but that is what this post is about… and more importantly, we are going to highlight the possible impact of not having a secure certificate on your website.

The debate has raged for a long time in web design and SEO circles as to the potential benefits and drawbacks of either having a secure certificate on your domain (SSL) or switching your domain over to HTTPS from HTTP. We have known for well over a year now that Google will give some favour to these types of sites in the search engine results pages (SERPS) but we have also known that the impact of changing has been minimal and the process cumbersome at best.

However Google have made it clear that they expect all websites to start to adhere to their desire for SSL in an effort to protect user data, but rather than steamroller changes they are slowly but surely driving it out with smaller tweaks over time.

Google have two major leverage points over web designers and SEO’s:

Google as a search engine

Google Chrome as an internet browser

Back in 2016, Google made slight changes to the ranking algorithm to give some benefit to HTTPS sites over HTTP sites. This means that most new websites that are being launched and particularly websites that are launched on platforms such as Shopify, Squarespace and the like are going to be HTTPS compliant.

They also ensured with the Google Chrome 56 update that anyone using a non-HTTPS website that had fields for entering credit card data would be marked as ‘not secure’ in the web browser itself to warn their users.

These two changes alone led to a reduction of 23% of users navigating to a non-HTTPS site that had credit card data entry points last year alone.

The Rise Of Chrome – And Why It Matters To Your Business Website

Whether you use Google Chrome or not is besides the point. In August 2017, Google Chrome enjoyed its biggest month yet in terms of usage statistics with a whopping 76.9% usage out of any browser. Safari was next in line with 13.1% – so the dominance in this field is clear.

Google have now decided to leverage this monopoly again with their upcoming update to Google Chrome (version 62).

Any website that has data entry fields (not just credit card information) will now be flagged as not secure at the point of data entry.

How the changes are rolling out

The impact of this for websites that expect a user to enter simple data (or complex data for that matter) are significant. Our customers are more aware of data protection now than ever before and whilst businesses are generally compliant with their data management in the offline world, it can sometimes be overlooked in the online world – and so Google has a fair point in making this a priority.

The problem is that many small business won’t have the expertise to manage the transfer of HTTP to HTTPS successfully without harming their site in some way – or at least they won’t feel that it is something they want to do.

How To Change to HTTPS from HTTP

The process will depend on a few factors but mainly it will depend on your hosting provider. Very few hosting providers will manage this process for you for free but it is well worth asking them. Particularly if you mention that you are changing hosting providers in order to obtain an SSL certificate more easily.

Failing that, you could consider paying a company to do this for you. It is something at Rise Online that we could offer but is certainly not something we would push hard to sell.

One area that we would prefer to support you with however is with either your SEO or your website design (or a mixture of the two) which is why for all new clients taking up our new pay monthly website design service (starting at £25 per month) we will manage the change from HTTP to HTTPS for you and include hosting in with the cost ensuring you do not fall foul of this warning and you have a fully functioning and modern website design.

]]>4069How To Use Google Postshttps://riseonline.co.uk/google-posts-how-to-use/
Fri, 23 Jun 2017 15:43:48 +0000https://riseonline.co.uk/?p=3846What are Google Posts and how to use them?

This week saw the mainstream introduction of Google Posts to Google My Business users across the UK, USA, Canada and other European countries.

Google Posts (or at least that’s what most people are calling them) provide business users with an opportunity to add a post (much like a Facebook or Twitter post) to their Google My Business listing along with a website linked call to action.

So why have Google Posts caused such a stir in the world of digital marketing and how do you use Google Posts?

To post, all you need to do is log in to your GMB profile and you will notice there is a new link on the navigational menu that says posts.

Click the posts button and then hit create post and you will see this…

From here you have a few choices. The first thing you are going to want to do is find a suitable image to include in your post (Google tends to use square images). If you are wondering what size image to use for Google Posts then 1024×1024 is a good size for anything up to a 4k monitor.

Now you need to think about your post content.

Ideally, Google wants you to use these posts as a way to promote your business’ latest offers or events, so feel free to create it much like an advert with a call to action.

If you are pushing someone towards a specific promotion or event then make sure you have a specific landing page for it so that you don’t suffer a high bounce rate.

So, where will you see your Google Post?

Your post will appear anywhere you see your business listing. So, if someone searches for your company or brand name then the chances are they will see this post – it adds a certain element of pizazz to your business listing… see ours below:

It remains to be seen whether or not Google will start displaying posts in the SERPS themselves but there is every reason to believe they will. We are expecting to see them popping up in the standard search results pages and the map results too.

The Google posts are so new that Google haven’t actually officially launched them yet so we are hoping that they will be staying. The official Google page still states that it is a trial for museums, sports teams and movies in the US and Brazil – but they have definitely soft launched in the UK and US as of today.

Why are Google Posts important and why use them?

In the vastly busy digital space businesses need to use every possible opportunity to be seen. Even if someone searches your brand they could easily be pulled away by an Google ad or another listing in the SERPS. By adding media rich content to your GMB listing along with a good value added call to action, you are going to increase your click through rate and hopefully help your customers to navigate to the right place with ease.

Google Posts are great for companies that put on events, constantly change their product lines or regularly offer discounts or run promotions – and as soon as you add a new post it will be show on your GMB listing so you can keep your business listing relevant and up to date with ease.

Remember, Google are all about providing a good customer experience so we advise you to stay within the guidelines and always keep the customer at the focus of what you post – no spam please… this isn’t 1997!

]]>3846Why Link Building Should Still be the Number One Strategy for Local Business SEOhttps://riseonline.co.uk/link-building-still-number-one-strategy-local-business-seo/
Wed, 31 May 2017 15:21:15 +0000https://riseonline.co.uk/?p=3797

There are over 200 ranking factors in the Google algorithm when it comes to deciding where your website should rank.

Fact.

So why is it that SEO experts have systematically used link building strategies like they are all that matter when ranking websites?

Well, that is partly because backlinks pointing to a website are just as important as they were ten years ago – but what very few people talk about is how the landscape for link building has changed and what is now deemed as being a good backlink profile.

We will cover all of the above in this article.

What Google Say

As we have already stated, there are over 200 ranking factors in the algorithm and we also now know that since Penguin 4.0 the algorithm is both real time and constantly evolving.

The search engine giant has constantly tried to improve the search results it provides to its users and to ensure that it provides quality (rather than manipulated results) Google has spent the best part of half a decade trying to find ways to identify spam links and either devalue them or even penalise a website that has them.

Part of the problem with this is that it was quite easy to negative SEO another website by pointing a lot of poor quality spammy links at it. Gary Illyes of Google has since told us that the Penguin 4.0 update will no longer penalise against bad links and instead it will just ignore them. Check out his Facebook post below:

This is good news particularly for smaller websites that might not have a ton of links and might have previously been impacted more severely by adding a toxic link accidentally – leaving a lot more room for error.

Whilst this is the case, it doesn’t mean that we should be going hell for leather on link building – but as the title of this article implies (well actually it screams) link building is still a very powerful strategy.

What Should Be My SEO Strategy in 2019?

Whether you have a small, medium, large or gigantic sized website the SEO landscape has essentially not changed for you in the last few years. Whilst it is true that the days are gone where anyone could point a few thousand spammy looking links at a website and rank it for almost anything are well and truly gone, it is also true that you will not rank a website for anything semi-competitive without a link building strategy.

How do we know this?

We know because we network with the greatest SEO experts on the planet.

We know because we have tested on hundreds of websites over the last few years and have analysed the results – and they are unanimous.

Don’t get us wrong, we have ranked some long tail keywords pretty quickly using just well optimised on-page SEO and content – but nothing competitive and nothing anywhere near the top of page one.

It just doesn’t happen!

We have tested websites where we have built out all of the content, implemented all of the on-page and left it for almost a year – keywords typically coming in around page 8 or 9 and either sticking or plummeting.

Then we build links and you see the upward trend over time.

We tend to track our links using programs such as Ahrefs, Majestic, Moz and Serped so we can be fairly sure of the accuracy of our results and that they are not being skewed by underhand tactics of another company.

How Should You Build Quality Links?

Since early 2015 the focus of link building has been all about quality. But what do we mean by quality links?

We are not just talking about a high domain or page authority website and whilst trust flow is our preferred metric of choice when judging a domain, it too is a metric that can be manipulated.

The reason we prefer trust flow (which is a metric used by Majestic) is because it shows relevance – topical trust flow shows this even more.

And in 2019 (and for some time now) the power that your website gets from the links pointing to it will all boil down to relevance.

Well that is not strictly speaking true. The power will flow anyway, but for impact in the SERPS you need relevance.

What is a Relevant Link?

Essentially a relevant link is a link from an external website that looks like it should be pointing to your website. For example, you wouldn’t expect a website that sells children’s toys to be linking to a website that sells adult only holidays – it just wouldn’t make sense in 99% of cases.

So we are looking for links from websites that have topical relevance and good trust flow – this is usually a trust flow of over 15 and at a ratio of 2:1 against citation flow.

So if the citation flow is 30 then the trust flow should be at least 15 or more.

It is also not just the topical relevance of the website that is important but also the URL structure that is pointing to you.

Imagine a website called catsandddogs.com and you had a website that was all about penguins (sorry but it must be on my mind) – now if that link pointing to you was coming from a URL like www.catsanddogs.com/top-10-dogs-to-own it really wouldn’t make sense and it would have little relevance, however if the link was www.catsanddogs.com/penguin-loving-dog then that might make a little more sense and there is more relevance in the URL that is pointing to you.

Now that is a bit of a silly example but you get the idea.

What is the Future of SEO?

SEO is certainly not going away and if anything the skill of an SEO has to be 10 times better now than it has ever had to be before. The art of building links remains and becomes an even more technically challenging job. The good news is that it is harder to destroy your website now but the reality is that it is also harder to build relevant links to give your website a boost up the rankings.

Local and small business owners are in the best position when it comes to using link building strategies as they have more niche markets to focus on and will find relevant links more easily than a national chain when it comes to ranking for local keywords.

If you’d like to have a chat about how we can help your local or national business website climb up the Google rankings then book a consultation here or head straight to our discovery form and let us show you how we can help.

SEO is dead. I have been hearing that phrase for years! Whilst this couldn’t be further from the truth, something that everyone would agree on is that the competition for search engine rankings is higher than ever – and the methods to get there are constantly evolving – or so Google would have you believe!

This article is going to focus around how to learn SEO. So why start off with such a dramatic first sentence?

Well, there are record numbers of people entering the realm of digital marketing and whether you call yourself an SEO, SEM, search visibility consultant, digital marketer (the list really does go on and on), what really matters and all that anybody really cares about is ranking their website on page one of major search engines.

So again… why the dramatic opening line?

Well – and here’s the real nub of it – what no-one tells these aspiring search marketers is that SEO is tough. It has grown increasingly difficult year by year and for a number of reasons.

More websites = more competition

More SEO’s = more competition

More DIY SEO’s = more competition

Smarter search engine algorithms = no shortcuts

These reasons alone make it very difficult for beginners to enter this saturated market place and have any great success – so whilst SEO is not dead, it can be a very lonely place when you are down on page 17 of Google where it is a ghost town – in that no-one ever goes there.

I meet a lot of aspiring SEO’s and the problem with most of them is that they have been sold a dream and think they can make big bucks over night. Whilst there may be the odd prodigy that has done this, in the main you will have to work very hard at carving your craft before you earn ‘the big bucks’ through SEO. After all, it is all about credibility in this market place as so many business owners have been scammed or fallen for low quality and cheaper services in the past.

Why learn SEO?

There are two main reasons why people learn SEO. One is to set up a business as an agency and provide SEO services to other businesses.

The second is because you already have a business and you want to promote your business – but rather than pay someone to do SEO for you, you would rather do it yourself. In fact – this is how I learned SEO all those years ago.

Now, whether you should learn SEO is something that only the individual can decide. What you should know going in is that it is going to take thousands of hours of research, learning, implementation, head banging, hair pulling, phone calls, webinars, pointless YouTube videos etc. before you get anywhere close to having some understanding of what it takes.

Now, if you are a business owner and you have a marketing budget that does not eat in to all of the company profit or if you have a budget to grow the business then you are almost 99% of the time going to be better off finding an agency or individual to take on the SEO for you. You are best at what you do and your time and money is best spent doing what you do best. If this is you – then head straight to my discovery form here and see if you qualify to work with me.

I got lucky. I was lucky that I had an insane amount of curiosity for SEO and I got results quickly. This is not the case for everyone! I also had money to throw after the best training on the planet – hands down the best! I worked with (and continue to work with) some of the brightest SEO minds in the world and you cannot put a price on that level of networking.

I also had countless amounts of time. Time to plough in to the learning and testing. This is where as a business owner you are going to lose the time you need to do what you do best.

For some though, the prospect of learning SEO is going to be exciting and if budget is an issue or you simply want to get a grasp of it then learning might be the best option.

How to learn SEO?

The biggest problem with learning SEO is that there are so many people out there who will tell you what to do. Some advice is good and some is bad. I will tell you now that 100% you could learn SEO just by watching a lot (and I mean hundreds) of YouTube videos, testing websites, destroying websites and ranking websites. You could join a mastermind training programme and pay 5 figures a year to learn like I did – but again how do you know which one to join and if you are just looking to rank one business website is it even worth it?

The point is that you can learn SEO if you want to for free – but it it is going to take you a long long time.

Is there an easier way?

The easiest way to be successful with SEO is to hire someone with credibility to do it for you. There is another solution that I have opened up for a very limited time only.

I like my clients to be educated on what I do for them. So I set up a private training area for them to learn every aspect of what I do. Now they don’t have to do this, but some of them like to learn more.

I recently opened up the membership to 100 people and we then closed out. I have decided to open up to 50 more – and that will be it – for good – 150 members getting all my knowledge is more than enough for my liking.

I am not going to do a big sell here and you can find out more about my training here (our SEO training is currently closed to new applicants) – but I will say that my over the shoulder training is going down a storm. I am taking a brand new local Birmingham business and building the website in front of your eyes, showing you how I do all the on-page SEO and we are about to start the off-page SEO very soon. You get to see everything.

Again, I am not going to do a big sell here – so if you want to see more you will have to check out the sales page here – there is a 25% discount when you use the code LAUNCH25 and the membership will close out as soon as we hit 150 members.